Vote SNP Today – Chagos Just One Example of the Need to Dismantle the Imperial Entity

Former Ambassador, Human Rights Activist

In Scotland I urge everybody to go out and vote SNP today, as the priority must be to send an unequivocal signal of support for Independence. I have respect for those who will vote Green and intend to send the same message, but it is not what I recommend you to do.

In the rest of the UK, I recommend people to vote Labour or Green as your analysis dictates. I am afraid I still have not seen sufficient evidence that my old party the Lib Dems has recovered from its sharp Orange Book lurch to the right to be able to recommend it.

The Chagos Islands vote at the UN yesterday illustrated why everybody should be ashamed of the label “British”. By a thumping 116 votes to 6, the UN General Assembly voted to uphold the International Court of Justice and demand that the UK return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

In the entire world, the only five countries allied with the UK are Donald Trump’s USA, apartheid Israel, ScoMo’s climate change denying Australia, Viktor Orban’s near fascist Hungary and the ultra corrupt Maldives. The fact that in the EU only the far right racist pariah Orban was prepared to support the UK, shows exactly the kind of far right rogue state the UK has become.

The forcible deportation of the entire population of the Chagos Islands by the British military to make way for a US nuclear base, subsequently used for extraordinary rendition and torture, is a story so shameful nobody with the slightest moral sense can possibly support it. I outlined the horrific complicity of the UK judiciary and political establishment right up to the present day, in one of the pieces of work I am most proud of. The UK’s decision to brazen it out and simply defy both the ICJ and UN as part of a far right alliance should cause anybody in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland to prioritise leaving the UK in the current elections – unless they wish to live in a far right rogue state.

There was a media spasm earlier this week over the UK’s complicity in torture, which MOD documents revealed to be ongoing. The astonishing thing about this is that all the media and political class had previously agreed to pretend it had stopped. It has never stopped, and there has been no change whatsoever in the policy since I resigned and blew the whistle over the policy in 2003.

As recounted in detail in Murder in Samarkand, I was told officially, while British Ambassador, at a meeting called specifically for the purpose, that the policy was that we will obtain intelligence from torture by “allied” security services like the Saudis or Bahrainis, and that this was not illegal provided that we do not specifically request that they torture people.

That policy is entirely compatible with the Cabinet Office Consolidated Guidance on Torture that reads we do not “participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for any purpose”. It can only be ill motivation that leads the entire UK political class to pretend that this guidance precludes the receipt of intelligence from the torture chambers of Riyadh, Guantanamo and Bahrain.

The guidance is specifically worded to allow receipt of material from torture. Otherwise the guidance would say “we do not receive intelligence material from torture”. It very deliberately does not say that. Government lawyers say that to get intelligence reports from a false confession wrung from someone beaten to death in Bahrain is not to “participate in, solicit, encourage or condone”. The defence is “we did not ask them to do it”. And so MI6 and British ministers, knowingly, see intelligence from torture on a daily basis.

The UK is an evil and corrupt entity, a supporter of torture, of the deportation of the Chagossians, of the slow genocide of the Palestinians, a key participant in illegal wars now looking to a new one against Iran to keep the profits of the military industrial complex rolling in. The UK as an institution will never be able to spurn its Imperialist and warmongering behaviour. The only solution is to break the UK, to shatter it into pieces as small as possible. The chaos at Westminster shows the Imperial power in the final phases of its political decline, something highlighted by the lack of international support at the UN. Let us hasten the UK towards its long overdue demise.
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